Bound Form

Aldea presents Bunden form (Bound Form), a solo exhibition by Norwegian artist Toril Johannessen. Seven sculptures in pine hang in the gallery, lit so that they cast a shadow play across the walls of the room.

The sculptures began as contours traced from photographs of people, animals and places Johannessen loves. Built up from stacked, profiled sections of laminated pine — measured, cut, milled and assembled — the forms hold those silhouettes obliquely: viewed from certain angles the shapes appear, in the sculptures and in the shadows they cast; from other angles they dissolve.

The work is introduced by an anecdote that stayed with the artist through the making: "But you're an artist, my doctor said. Couldn't you process your emotions through your art? No, period, I said." Yet the question lingered. What does it mean to process emotions through art, and what forms might it take — therapeutic storytelling, solace, catharsis through free form? Or is it, as Johannessen puts it, more a matter of working your way through it: "shaping, lifting, carrying, learning, measuring, cutting, milling, thinking, screwing, sweating, constructing, constructing, constructing." The title holds the same thought — bunden form is the Norwegian term for verse bound to fixed metre: feeling carried, and set free, inside strict form.

Bunden form was made at Aldea in Bergen in 2025, in collaboration with Arne Skaug Olsen (woodwork), Soheil Hivad Nabi (3D modelling and CNC) and Cameron MacLeod (planning), with production support from the Lorck Schive Art Prize. The series premiered at the Lorck Schive Art Prize 2025 at Trondheim Kunstmuseum, where the leftover materials were cut into firewood and burned in a bonfire outside the museum. With this exhibition the work returns to the workshop where it was built — shown in Bergen for the first time, in the artist's first solo exhibition at Aldea.

Toril Johannessen (b. 1978) lives and works in Bergen. Her practice examines the structures and frameworks of knowledge — from everyday knowing to scientific method — combining research-based, systematic approaches with personal perspectives across printmaking, textiles, sculpture and installation. Educated at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts (MA, 2008), her recent work includes solo shows at Tromsø Kunstforening (2025), Bergen Kunsthall (2024) and OSL Contemporary (2023), and public commissions for KORO at the Life Science Building at the University of Oslo (2026) and Evenes Air Station (2023). She has exhibited at the Lorck Schive Art Prize at Trondheim Kunstmuseum (2025), Barents Spektakel at Terminal B, Kirkenes (2024 and 2026), Survival Kit / Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (2024), Henie Onstad Art Centre (2024), Munch (2022), Malmö Konstmuseum (2021), LIAF – Lofoten International Art Festival (2019), the 13th Dak'Art Biennale de Dakar (2018), Plug In ICA, Winnipeg (2017), Tallinn Art Hall (2017), Hayward Touring (2014), the 13th Istanbul Biennial (2013) and Documenta 13 (2012). Her works are held in the collections of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, KODE Bergen, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum and Preus Museum, among others. In recent years her work has centred on the cultural, political and military landscape of the High North.